Sunday, August 14, 2011

If Someone's Gonna Brag on My Daddy....I'm Gonna Brag Right Back On Them

I hate to admit, but I haven't been able to watch much of the Matt Lautner TV posts over the past few weeks, because we are so busy at work, and I just can't make time to log on to You Tube and watch. I was honored to do a guest phone-in interview for the MLC TV show last week while driving home from work one day....and that was a lot of fun.

However, since my favorite judge was judging the Illinois State Fair steer show this past week, I tuned in to watch the Matt Lautner TV video of the champion drive....http://youtu.be/LEoJGjl5j9I

I have to say that I greatly enjoyed watching this video clip. Doing something like this type of production isn't easy, and isn't free either. There is a lot of time and effort and technical support required. I wanted to commend the people involved in this effort for doing a service that many can enjoy.

Years ago, Cherie Carrabba used to tell me how she wished we could get cattle shows broadcast on TV like they do the dog shows. The challenge is the down time, and that shows can drag on and on.

I like this format of showing the videos in short segments. I think the MLC team did a good job of keeping the videos short enough that they don't get boring, but also long enough to show the important highlights. We worked with Cattle in Motion on a similar project last week where they broadcast the champion drive highlights from the Kickoff Classic. The Cattle in Motion videos had background music, as opposed to commentary. (Oh and by the way you can see my handsome husband showing the reserve grand champion heifer in this video....which is owned by us!) After we posted those videos we had a ton of great response from people saying how they greatly enjoyed the Brahman show video highlights especially with the music like "We are the Champions" playing in the background.

To me, the commentary is where you could get into some trouble, if you had someone doing the commentary that didn't do a professional job. Clearly there are things that may be said or overheard around a makeup ring that wouldn't need to be broadcast on the internet.

In this video I watched, Chris Terembes and Matt Lautner (the hosts) gave the perfect commentary I thought. He obviously knew the inside details about the different steers but he presented it in a way that provided factual information like sires, dams, breeders, showmen, parents names, etc. It gave a bit of a personal touch so the viewers could know what was going on, but they avoided saying any personal opinions. Hats off to Chris and Matt for doing such a professional job. I also know from my experiences with the Cattle.com videos in Denver a few years, it's not as easy as it looks to be on the videos or tv. Chris and Matt did an exceptional job of making sure there wasn't a lot of downtime, they spoke clearly, they were easy and pleasant to understand, and they were very professional. And trust me, when there is a video camera rolling, it's easy to get nervous.

The MLC TV clip also gave ample time to allow the viewers to listen to the outstanding judge's comments too. So in my opinion, this particular clip had a perfect mix of introduction, commentary, judges comments, and good views of all of the steers in the lineup. Again, I give it a great review!

If I was a sponsor of one of these segments, I would also be very pleased at the sponsor recognition. I'm not sure how much MLC is charging for these, but they did a great job of recognizing the sponsors numerous times, and I also noticed the sponsor name was built into the video's title. All extra incentives to the sponsor.

I thought this was a great example of Matt and his team pooling together the combined resources of lots of people in the show steer circles to produce something all of us could enjoy. Thanks again to this crew and I'm looking forward to watching more.